Overview
Document Management is a philosophy which can assist
companies or other groups with organizing and
appropriately sharing the volumes of data they
generate each day. Contracts, e-mails,
correspondences, presentations, spreadsheets are
often created in assembly line fashion and meet an
immediate need for a particular user or project.
Document management helps associate that data,
provide context, and leverage it on a deeper level.

By associating documents into discrete groupings,
information contained in individual pieces and
ultimately the knowledge represented by the
collection as a whole can be leveraged in a
multitude of ways. As an example, consider two
mid-size software firms and the number of documents
generated/exchanged in the securing and delivery of
a product to a customer:

In the traditional model, this process would likely
involve a workflow with several people in different
departments and layers of management progressing
with only the background provided by the individual
immediately before them in the process. While
functional, significant amounts of time may be spent
contacting individuals to assess the context of the
events which have taken place so far--if there was a
recent price change which copy of the marketing
materials were sent, any special issues needed to be
included in the NDA, titles of customer contacts to
be included on contracts, promised deadlines, etc.

Company B - Utilizing Formal Document Management
Strategy

While certainly possible to accomplish manually,
Document Management strategies are typically
implemented using and Electronic Document Management
Solution (EDMS). In this case, as data is gathered
at each stage of the sales workflow, it is stored in
a central repository--as emails are received the
user clicks a button and the content is copied to
the EDMS, the word processing or PDF contract
documents are saved directly to the content store,
marketing materials should already be stored in the
EDMS and perhaps links to the ones sent would be
stored in each client binder.

Now as users prepare to perform their particular
function in the workflow, they can quickly and
easily peruse the data gathered and generated during
previous stages to gain context and take better
meaningful and informed action. With the integration
of an Instant Messaging platform into the EDMS,
users can quickly see if the author of a piece of
content is on-line and have questions answered via
'chat' as opposed to more time consuming options
like making a phone call or drafting an email. These
enhancements benefit the current sales effort, but
consider the effect on future business transactions:

If a new sales rep is assigned to the
account, they can quickly perform a self study
of the relationship based on the actual events
and communications. In addition to saving time,
this eliminates the potential for human bias to
interfere with the formation of the first
impression. Additionally authors of individual
documents may be on-line and available for chat.

Better consistency in dealing with this
client for future transactions as the entire
communication history can be available to new
representatives or management.

As individuals either change positions or
leave the company, a wealth of company/customer
information is often abandoned within their
email files. By including select communications
in a well structured content store, accurate
context can be applied to other business
documents like contracts, policies, and
presentations.

Users can perform searches of components for
the complete content store in order to mine
information on existing relationships, look for
potential trouble points, or quickly find data
they need to access.

Data is stored in a secure and repository
which is subject to standard backup
procedures--thereby eliminating loss of data
because of user error or local hardware error or
theft.

Standard EDMS features
There are a variety of well established Electronic
Document Management solutions on the market. While
each has its set of unique features, look for the
following basic areas of functionality in any
solutions you consider:

Document locking (check in/out)

Version control

Collection of meta-data

Integrated Review/Approval cycles

Integration with major desktop
applications

Full text search of the content store

Proven and flexible security model

Ability to integrate with Instant
Messaging platform

Comparing EDMS Solutions
Beyond ensuring a particular package has all of the
standard features you're looking for, additional
consideration should be given to:

Volume of documents to be stored (both
number of documents and size of files)

Number of users requiring access to the EDMS

Hardware/Operating System requirements

Licensing options (per server and per user)

Performance statistics

User interface options

Ability to customize appearance and functionality

Strength and flexibility of security models

Solutions will range from simple shareware applications that can be
applied to files on a network server to industrial scale applications
with full data redundancy and failover meant for 24/7 uptime with
thousands of concurrent users.

The staff at IIUI has first hand experience and formed opinions on
several of the available packages. Please contact
Daniel Lieber for further
information on finding the right solution to meet your organizations
needs!